PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PR. SS

Joyce's "The Dead": The Dissolution of the Self and the Police
Author(s): J. P. Riquelme
Source: Style , Fall 1991, Vol. 25, No. 3, James Joyce's Dubliners (Fall 1991), pp. 488-505
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/42945932

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 J.P. Riquelme

Joyce's "The Dead":

The Dissolution of the Self and the Police

The charge that literature, particularly prose fiction, serves primarily a

socially compliant rather than a socially resisting function has been vigorously
made in some recent books dealing with nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-
tury narratives. 1 The long final chapter of one of these books, Vincent Pecora's
Self and Form in Modern Narrative, contains a concerted attack on Joyce's
"The Dead" as an example of early modernist fictional technique in service
to ideological delusions, particularly to a mystification concerning authenticity
and generosity that Gabriel Conroy exemplifies. 2 Pecora maintains that both
the story's narrating strategies, especially free indirect discourse, and its the-
matics of generosity are in league with "acquisitive, administrative, decon-
structive tendencies" (229) that undermine the potentially resistant autonomy
of "the bourgeois individual." In Pecora's reading, which he clearly seeks to
extend to modernist fiction in general, the self in "The Dead" is dissolved into
exhaustion and incoherence. The debilitating dissolution renders the self in-
capable of anything but compliance with the manipulating structures of desire
used by an imperialistic, capitalistic system as forms of administrative control.
According to Pecora, the compliance and manipulation are not only signaled
but also furthered by the difficulty oflocating the character's voice in Joyce's
version of free indirect style. In this interpretation, Joyce is an ideological
writer whose story celebrates bourgeois delusions, particularly in Gabriel's
feeling of generosity that is apparently expressed in the closing paragraphs.
The force of Pecora's urgently pressed argument deserves to be recognized
but also resisted. His reading objectifies "The Dead" in particular and literature
in general by treating both primarily as the result and instrument of social
forces. It ignores literature's pragmatic, affective character as the cause of vary-
ing responses in readers. ••The Dead" can coherently be read as a tale about
coercive social forces with which the central character is aligned, but in judging
the author's, the character's, and our own relations to those forces, we may
find good reasons not to accept a description that emphasizes passive com-
plicity. Gabriel Conroy does not just give up in the story in any general,
intransitive way. He gives up something, his deluded sense of control, supe-
riority, and knowledge. Rather than giving in to administrative control by
abandoning the will that might resist, Gabriel begins to leave behind his own
willfulness, which has tended to perpetuate social hierarchies of domination.
Social resistance and social complicity are too restrictive a pair of interpretative

488 Style: Volume 25, No. 3, Fall 1991

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"The Dead" 489

opposites to account adequately for the shifting implications of ''The Dead"

and many other prose narratives. As a tale that overtly concerns the effects of
death on the living, "The Dead" resists being relegated to mere complicity
with the hierarchies that it presents because the presentation exposes delusions
about mastery. The exposure of delusion, not the maintenance of hierarchies,
is bound up with the dissolution of the self that Pecora excoriates. 3 The death
signaled in Joyce's story by the dissolving of the self and by the intensified
use of free indirect style tends to reverse rather than to reinforce some con-
ventional attitudes. As the vehicle for communicating and transferring the
reversal to the reader, free indirect style is central to the effect that "The Dead"
has on the living.
"The Dead" is a text concerned with the sort of social hierarchies that
have been increasingly castigated as ideological and exclusionary in recent
literary criticism attentive to political concerns. Like the imagined and real
presence of snow, the effect of hierarchies, which is general in the story, involves
Gabriel Conroy centrally. Gabriel plays a normative and administrative role
that verges on policing, understood not neutrally as action designed to maintain
order but as action of a manipulative, repressive sort. We learn early in the
story that he makes his children eat, do, and wear what he thinks is in their
best interest (Dubliners 180; hereafter D). Differently presented, this kind of
action might be defended as normal parental solicitude, but his sometimes
tactless, high-handed behavior and Gretta's description of his actions make
him appear more dominating than concerned. And his reported treatment of
the children is, in effect, glossed by his insistence that Gretta wear galoshes
for her own good. That insistence, to which Gretta does not accede, reflects
Gabriel's desire to express the superiority of his continental taste and knowl-
edge.4 Like many other members of the middle and upper classes in his time
and in our own, Gabriel has the disposable income and the time to purchase
goods and engage in activities intended to promote health, fitness, and lon-
gevity. He participates in a cultural mythology about improving and prolonging
life that includes a denial of death. More than just a judge of what is good for
his family, Gabriel is the main arbiter of taste and action in the story, rendering
judgments of praise and blame in his thoughts and in his after-dinner speech.
He speaks as one of those in his society empowered to maintain order, tra-
dition, and the status quo.
The numerous interlocking hierarchies that inform the story's social
world, particularly those involving class, gender, race, colonialism, national-
ism, and regional prejudice, are evident enough. As a young, single, female
servant, Lily, the caretaker's daughter, represents the base of a complex social
pyramid at whose apex stands Gabriel, a well-off, mature but not yet old,
married professional man. A great deal of Gabriel's anxiety in the story con-
cerns his fear of slipping from the pinnacle that he occupies: that is, his fear
that others will not see him as he wishes to be seen. His experiences in tum

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490 J.P. Riquelme

with Lily, with the nationalistic Miss lvors, and with his wife indicate to
Gabriel and to the reader that the views some others hold about him do not
in fact conform to his own. The encounters provide perspectives for reassessing
his standing and his positions. The sometimes prejudicial language and atti-
tudes with which Gabriel defensively resists the reassessment help make the
need for it clear. When Gabriel finally experiences a dissolution of the self (a
state accompanied by increased use of free indirect style), the cause is not his
acquiescence to socially administered pressures to conform. (Even if it were,
the reader could reasonably be expected to recognize such an acquiescence as
a doubtful model for emulation. But the reader is not encouraged to judge
Gabriel in such a distanced way.) Instead, the dissolution indicates the un-
dermining of Gabriel's position as judge and model in various hierarchies of
conformity. It marks his abdication and his removal from the role of the master
that critics such as D. A. Miller align with the police.
At the story's end, Joyce coordinates the dismantling of Gabriel's defenses
with Gretta's assumption of the speaker's role. It would be going too far to
claim that male speech and the male gaze are displaced by woman's speech
and the female gaze at the end of "The Dead," but, at the least, the male's
ignorance about the meaning of the woman's perspective is partially overcome
in a recognition of shared mortality. When Gabriel discovers his ignorance
and achieves certainty about death, the previously unspoken and unspeakable
are translated into a style of free indirect discourse that some critics claim is
itself"unspeakable." 5 Readily speakable language would be too prone to carry
habitual, prescribed meanings. One effect of the language and the situation is
to require a reevaluation of our habits. Habit crumbles not in a Paterian
experiential moment of multiple, heightened, hedonistic stimulation but in a
sober perception about the inevitable, singular end of all stimulation and ex-
perience.
When the distinctness of Gabriel's individual voice is submerged in the
concluding passages of free indirect style, he loses not his voice per se but only
his place as spokesperson for the hierarchy. He becomes instead a means by
which voices other than his own, particularly female voices, that have been
silenced, slighted, and ignored can begin to be articulated or amplified. As
spokesperson for the hierarchy, Gabriel speaks in part to confirm his own self-
image and social standing, which he wishes to have echoed back to him. As
the catalyst for the nonechoic, unmanipulated speech of others, he experiences
in the story's conclusion the displacement of that self-image and a radical,
irreversible shift in position. But before he can assume the role of catalyst for
a woman's speaking, Gabriel must move beyond being merely the conventional
provoker of woman's anger. And he must abandon his automatic, defensive
attempts to maintain or regain his mastery.
Women speak in response to Gabriel's provocations throughout the story
in ways that he neither anticipates nor intends, and their speech causes him

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"The Dead" 491

discomfort. In effect, his efforts to hear the confirming echo of his own speech
backfire, for the women respond effectively in negative ways to the role he
plays as a model of male superiority in an imperialistic, class-structured society.
Two moments involving woman's speech in the encounter with Lily can help
clarify the meaning of Gabriel's position in a social hierarchy that can be
dominating and exploitative. The first moment includes Lily's pronunciation
of Gabriel's surname when she asks, "-Is it snowing again, Mr. Conroy?"
Since Joyce renders the statement by standard spelling, the reader has no reason
to suspect a nonstandard pronunciation until Gabriel belatedly notes it in
thought: "Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and
glanced at her" (D 177). Unlike the reader, Gabriel has heard not only her
individually intended, semantic meaning but the markers of class difference,
which are part of a cultural system's intentions rather than merely the indi-
vidual's. Joyce could easily have presented Lily's dialectal speech at the time
of its report rather than leaving the recognition of it to Gabriel, who knows
the indexes of social rank within the hierarchy. The insertion of a determinate
thought report into the third-person statement of action makes evident the
otherwise invisible, hierarchical motivation for Gabriel's smile and glance at
someone he sees as an ignorant serving girl. The brief report of thought, co-
ordinated here with Gabriel's position as arbiter of rank, contrasts markedly
with the lengthy passage of free indirect style at the story's end, a passage that
indicates his removal from that position.
Gabriel's smile and the glance are withdrawn when Lily punctuates their
encounter with her remark, " - The men that is now is only all palaver and
what they can get out of you" (D 178). Since Joyce renders this instance of
nonstandard usage explicitly as a matter of grammar, the educated reader does
not need Gabriel's assistance this time in placing Lily socially. Gabriel is in
no position to assist or even to comment coherently, since he is too taken
aback by the vehemence and the semantic content of the statement to register
the class difference. Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the statement
combine to create a situation that throws Gabriel offbalance but not necessarily
the reader. The would-be master of ceremonies and speaker is rendered tem-
porarily speechless by the serving girl. His loss of composure initiates a pattern
that will be repeated with Miss lvors and Gretta. Gabriel recognizes, if only
vaguely and defensively, the possibility of a mistake, and the result is not a
smile and a look but a blush, a glance away, and the lack of a spoken response,
followed by a gift of money as if he felt the money would make up for the
gaffe. The exchange, which involves gold and an ungrammatical statement
about palaver, indicates again that a hierarchy is in place, but commercial and
sexually exploitative elements are evoked that were not evident in the earlier
case of dialectal pronunciation. Gabriel's paternalistic view of Lily as a little
girl and an ignorant servant finds its negative counterpart, but not its antithesis,
in Lily's implied experience as an adult with men. The less than benign char-

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492 J.P. Riquelme

acter of the hierarchy, including Gabriel's place in it as a man, is communicated

implicitly by the word "palaver" and by Gabriel's subsequent gift of the coin.
"Palaver" can refer to profuse and idle talk, but the history of the word's use
carries other implications.
Neither Lily nor Gabriel appears to know what Joyce almost surely did
and the reader can easily discover, the way the word entered the English lan-
guage. "Palaver" comes from the Portuguese palavra, meaning "word," whose
Latin and Greek roots also give us the English word "parable." They also give
us the word "parley," a kind of talk that involves opposing sides and their
relations of power. There is a parable about the connection of imperialism to
male chauvinism and to class hierarchies in Joyce's assigning "palaver" to
Lily and in her use of it to characterize relations between the sexes. "Palaver"
is one normally unspoken "word known to all men" (Ulysses 3.435, 15.4192-
93; hereafter U) and to all women in the story's world though not in the sense
in which Stephen Dedalus uses that phrase in Ulysses. According to the OED,
the earliest recorded instance of the substantive refers not just to "a talk, parley,
conference, discussion" generally speaking but to a conference "with much
talk, between African or other tribespeople, and traders or travellers." As the
headnote to the entry in the OED explains, "palavra appears to have been
used by Portuguese traders on the coast of Africa for a talk or colloquy with
the natives (quot. 1735), to have been there picked up by English sailors (quot.
1771 ), and to have passed from nautical slang into colloquial use" ( 11: 90).
The OED illustrates that colloquial use involving the encounter between in-
vader and native-the kind of encounter frequently alluded to in Joyce's later
writing, especially Finnegans Wake-with quotations from the early, the mid-
dle, and the end of the nineteenth century. The meaning persisted in published
writing about Africa until at least 1897, only a decade before the writing of
"The Dead." As the quotations cited in the OED make clear, the English
exported the word to India as part of imperial culture. There and elsewhere
in the Empire, the word was often used as verb or noun to describe in a
condescending way native habits of talking. Palaver was predicated of the
Indians, the Africans, and, of course, those loquacious Irish.
An Irish writer of Joyce's time sensitive to the hierarchical relations
between England and Ireland and to the attendant stereotyping of the Irish
might reasonably be expected to use such a word with a wide range of impli-
cations. The earliest example cited by the OED involves a discussion that
concludes with gold changing hands as part of a suit for damages. Lily's state-
ment and Gabriel's gift of the gold coin as inadequate recompense for damages
implicitly transfer the imperialistic meanings to the relations between the sexes
in "The Dead." Like African traders, men are out to make a profit for them-
selves by engaging in palaver with supposedly gullible, ignorant, and inferior
partners. Like the natives, women are given as recompense in the transaction
money or articles of ostensible value, including perhaps jewelry or items of

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"The Dead" 493

clothing, such as galoshes, intended to brighten up, modernize, or otherwise

improve their backward lives. With the help of gold, Gabriel survives his
skirmish with the representative of a lower class. He is injured but not disabled
for the task of maintaining his place at the top of the social pyramid.
The encounter with Miss Ivors also involves the relations between the
sexes and imperial contexts, not trade this time but military action, nation-
alism, and colonial allegiances. In the story's first part, Gabriel does not dance
at the call of "Quadrilles! Quadrilles!" (D 183), but he does in the second part
when "Lancers were arranged" (D 187). According to the OED, the word
"quadrille" refers to a "square dance, of French origin," but, as the headnote
to the entry indicates, it derives from French, Spanish, and Italian words that
mean "a band, troop, company, 'a Squadron containing 25 (or fewer) Soul-
diers' " (12: 960-61 ). The name for the kind of quadrille that Gabriel dances,
"lancers," makes the military connection explicit for English speakers. By
means of "quadrilles" the coordinated movement of soldiers with weapons is
domesticated and brought into the drawing room, where it is performed politely
and harmlessly to music by noncombatants. The noncombatants, however,
are always men and women paired together, as Gabriel and Miss lvors are in
this case. Through the sexual pairing, Joyce undoes the pacification of the
<lance's origin, in effect revealing the conflictual character of that origin, by
turning the man and the woman into antagonists. The dance becomes in "The
Dead" the vehicle for a clash that involves national and regional allegiances
and gender stereotypes, including the sense of gender identity that depends on
those stereotypes.
The coordinated movements become unexpectedly the means by which
a joust occurs in which the man is unhorsed. Like Mr. Deasy in the second
episode of Ulysses, Miss lvors does not mind breaking a lance with her partner.
Gabriel, however, does mind because her looks, speech, and attitudes bring
to the fore competing national and regional ties as well as gender expectations
in ways that disconcert him. In a partial repetition of the scene with Lily,
Gabriel colors, responds to Miss lvors only "lamely" (D 187-88), and avoids
her eyes (D 190). The pressure directed against the stability of Gabriel's position
in the hierarchy has increased considerably over the earlier encounter, however,
largely because Gabriel cannot use his class standing as an effective cover. The
relatively formal application of the surname to Miss Ivors in the narration
concerning Gabriel's encounter with her contrasts with the use of the first
name for the servant. The contrast indicates Miss lvors's higher class standing
in Gabriel's eyes. But Gabriel's use of the surname also communicates his
male distance and sense of superiority with respect to the woman whom Gretta
addresses and refers to simply as "Molly" (D 191, 195-96).
Because of Miss Ivor's comparatively unfeminine attire and her frank
statements, Gabriel's assumptions about gender, appropriate behavior, and his
own identity are all implicitly shaken. 6 As the narrator and, by implication,

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494 J. P. Riquelme

Gabriel note, "She did not wear a low-cut bodice" (D 187). Presumably, a
man's eye would respond in a conventional, sexually engaged way to the flesh
that a low bodice revealed. In the place of flesh at her throat, Miss I vors displays
the nationalistic emblem that turns the covered bodice into something more
aggressive and oppositional than merely a refusal to show flesh. Putting a
political symbol where the mark of gender identity should by conventional
standards appear reinforces the challenge to Gabriel's composure. His disquiet
is keen because Miss Ivors combines unconventional, unfeminine dress and
talk with the friendly gesture of a "firmly pressed" hand (D 190) and with
joking that contains serious criticism of Gabriel's politics. This mixture does
not fit neatly into the categories that Gabriel relies on to maintain his sense
of identity and decorum. A low-cut bodice would clearly be more comforting.
Gabriel cannot consider her only a girl, as he did Lily, but he also wonders
about her being a woman in the way he normally conceives of women. He
thinks of her irritably as "the girl or woman, or whatever she was" (D 190).
Not liking the image of him that he suspects she sees when she is "staring at
him," he resists internally by resorting to language that criticizes her looks in
the other sense. Her looking at him as she does makes her less than good-
looking in his view. Those eyes that have pierced him like a lance become for
Gabriel part of an unattractive face that is less than human; they are "rabbit's
eyes" (D 190). Gender and politics are conflated in the encounter, with Gabriel
emerging as a collaborator whose male identity is threatened and Miss lvors
as his unwomanly nationalist opponent. Since Gabriel finds himself unable to
defend his politics easily to her, he resorts to slurs that he refrains from saying
aloud but that we hear. Gabriel pays Lily off with a coin. He pays Miss Ivors
back silently with the thoughts that she is unattractive physically and, what
may be as bad in his view, that she is discourteous (D 203). Her implied failure
to meet Gabriel's standards for her gender and her class enables him to keep
his sense of himself temporarily intact.
The closing scene with Gretta in the story's third part repeats in height-
ened and extended ways the two earlier ones. The toppling force exerted against
Gabriel's position in the hierarchy is now literally closer to home, and it is
impossible for him to ignore the conclusions to be drawn from his talk with
Gretta. The views of his spouse are obviously harder to avoid and more in-
timately bound up with his sense of himself than the views of a servant whom
he rarely sees or even those of a colleague. Though Gabriel tries briefly to
employ strategies of prejudice with Gretta concerning Michael Furey, whom
he considers "a boy in the gasworks" (D 219), they do not protect him in the
partially successful way they had earlier in the evening. If Gabriel is not exactly
hoisted by his own lance, he at least stumbles badly when he tries to use it.
He is "humiliated by the failure of his irony" (D 220). As with Lily and Miss
Ivors, he turns away and his face colors, but this time his ability to respond
with speech neither disappears temporarily nor turns lame. His manner of

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"The Dead" 495

speaking and the implications and effects of that manner are, however, trans-
formed. No longer playing a policelike role, he cannot "keep up his tone of
cold interrogation." Instead his voice becomes "humble and indifferent" (D
220). Its indifferent quality implies no lack of feeling, but it does suggest that
Gabriel's irony and the motivation to inflict it are gone. Earlier in the con-
versation, Gabriel wanted to elicit from Gretta certain responses that would
have left him feeling satisfied and in charge. Once Gabriel's tone changes, she
is no longer the intended object of his potential manipulation. He helps her
to speak and to tell her story but not as the subject of an unfriendly interro-
gation. By posing questions that help her to continue speaking, Gabriel pro-
vides only the accompaniment for Gretta's more important performance. Con-
roy lays down his lance and dispenses with palaver by abetting a woman's
speech that tells him things he would rather not hear.
The change in Gabriel's behavior indicates something other than capit-
ulation to socially administered forces. It occurs rather in the wake of his
having discovered his own blatant self-delusions about his position as a mortal
subject in relation to other mortal subjects. In the three scenes with Lily, Miss
lvors, and Gretta, Gabriel turns away from them in order that they not see
the blush that reflects what Gabriel encounters in their views about him. He
also averts his eyes in order to avoid seeing reflected in their faces the harsh
truth about himself. In the scene with Gretta, Gabriel eventually turns his eyes
toward her once she sleeps. When he does, he encounters a fact about her that
also applies to himself: "He did not like to say even to himself that her face
was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which
Michael Furey had braved death" (D 222). This reflection on her looks differs
substantially in tone and implication from Gabriel's vindictive thoughts about
Miss lvors. I say this despite the fact that embedded in the statement may be
Gabriel's sense that the young man would have been attracted to Gretta largely
for her face. Even if that is part of Gabriel's attitude, it is not the primary
part, for Gabriel expresses indirectly as a diminution in beauty both Gretta's
aging and their own changed relations. He no longer tries to think delusively
of her as the young woman he courted or of their relations as those of young
lovers exchanging affectionate letters. His sense of their marriage has changed
utterly. That Gabriel sees primarily aging inscribed on her face becomes clear
when he recalls almost immediately "that haggard look" on Aunt Julia's face
while she was singing. He recognizes in the faces of these two women something
that he had failed to see in either Lily or Miss Ivors, the mortality that he
shares with them. He sees the equivalent of the snow that will eventually cover
their graves and his own.
The women's faces act as mirrors that reverse Gabriel's self-image by
reflecting to him an image that he recognizes as his own even though it differs
from his expectations and desires. At a moment crucial to the closing dialogue
with Gretta, Gabriel literally catches sight of himself in a mirror. At first, the

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496 J.P. Riquelme

image he sees meets his expectations. But soon he understands the image in
the mirror to be other than he wishes. The shift resembles the one that occurred
in the talk he had earlier with Lily, in which her nonstandard speech occasions
initially a confirmation of his superiority that is subsequently displaced by the
unflattering reflection of himself in her statement about "men." These expe-
riences involving reactions against unwanted representations of the self are
related to the passage from Michel Foucault's "Language to Infinity" that
Pecora chooses as epigraph for his discussion of "The Dead":

Headed toward death, language turns back upon itself; it encounters something like a mirror;
and to stop this death which would stop it, it possesses but a single power: that of giving
birth to its own image in a play of mirrors that has no limits. (qtd. in Pecora 214)

This is a suggestive statement to juxtapose with a story that literally concerns

both death and a character who catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror. The
point of Pecora's placement of the passage seems to be that "The Dead" tends
toward a self-reflexive play of language that is a denial of death. He has im-
plicitly in view both Joyce's later writing and the frequent celebrations of the
free play of language in Joyce by poststructuralists other than Foucault, Phi-
lippe Sollers, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. By attacking "The Dead"
in the way that he does, Pecora in effect attacks modernism and poststruc-
turalism. But aspects of the story relevant to Gabriel's glimpse in the mirror
can be understood in an antithetical way as tending to undo the denial of death
that often characterizes modern, bureaucratized, technologized consumer cul-
ture.
Ifwe follow Lacan's lead rather than Foucault's, the undoing can be said
to involve a momentary reversal of the mirror stage by means of the gaze. But
it is only helpful, not absolutely necessary, to invoke Lacan in order to argue
against Pecora's suggestion that there is a denial of death in "The Dead."
Contrary to his view, "The Dead" is a story about a character who encounters
the inevitability of his own death and loses at least temporarily his sense of
being at the pinnacle of multiple hierarchies. The displacement reveals rather
than reinforces the social conventions supporting the hierarchies that made
the now displaced self-representation seem authentic. The curious, uncom-
fortable position that Gabriel finds himself in at the story's end has one formal
counterpart in Joyce's use of free indirect style.7 Gabriel is neither exactly the
teller of his own tale nor exclusively the object of a tale being told by another;
he is both teller and tale, representer and representation. His status corresponds
to the middle voice in Sanskrit or Greek, which is neither exactly active nor
passive but rather somewhere in between. That status also corresponds to
Marx's view, formulated in the opening paragraphs of The Eighteenth Bru-
maire of Louis Bonaparte, that when people make history "they do not make
it just as they please": they make it always "under circumstances" (Marx 595).
What occurs for the reader and for Gabriel is something like a disruption of

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"The Dead" 497

the conventional realistic perspective in painting. Gabriel Conroy arrives at

the position of being neither an autonomous self only nor an administered self
(to use Pecora's terminology) through the experience of recognizing himself
now as apparently one, now as apparently the other. The oscillation of dom-
inating and dominated selves captured by Joyce's free indirect style and by
his narrative signals the simultaneous but mutually transforming reality of
both positions. In "The Dead" the mutual interference of the opposing views
results not in an experience of undecidability but in Conroy's decidedly un-
ambiguous recognition of eventual death. But the terms "dominating" and
"dominated," "autonomous" and "administered," even used together, do not
capture adequately the effects and implications attending a strong premonition
of death, including the "terror" (D 220) that can lead to a rethinking of every-
thing from the ground up.
The recognition of what T. S. Eliot called "the skull beneath the skin"
is bound up with the reversal that Gabriel experiences when he sees himself
briefly in the mirror during the private scene with his wife. The reversal occurs
in one way as a felt shift in his position on the social pyramid. Rather than
being in charge, he has become a servant, in his own words, "a ludicrous figure,
acting as a pennyboy for his aunts" (D 220). As did Lily earlier, he sees himself
now as subject to their whims. He views himself, as he did her, as a child.
Like her, he has become the recipient of the largesse of those whom he serves.
No longer seemingly independent, he is not just a male working for women
but a boy running errands for old women. Many of Gabriel's prejudices ob-
viously contribute to his new negative sense of himself. The new image
counters and reverses the self-representation that Gabriel has struggled to pro-
tect. Rather than displacing the old self-image of something full ("his broad
well-filled shirt front" [D 218] and his sense of being "full of memories" of a
life "full of tenderness and joy and desire" [D 2191) with another image of
fullness, the new image replaces it with something that is both antithetical and
empty. Gabriel reads that opposite as "pitiable," "ludicrous," "fatuous," and
devalued, worth a penny, much less than the gold coin he gave to Lily. It is
not inconsequential that the emptying out of the previously full image in the
mirror occurs in the same scene as do Gabriel's thoughts about his kinship
with the moribund and the dead. For the first time he recognizes a basis for
comparing rather than contrasting himself to those whom he wanted to dom-
inate. Gabriel's ultimate abasement is to see himself as even lower than a
servant, as deader than the dead for having lived less fully than a long dead,
young factory worker from the west oflreland. Gabriel moves from considering
himself superior, in effect more sensitive, alive, and valuable than those be-
neath him in the social hierarchy, to realizing that someone of low birth,
country background, and little education has had experiences that he can nei-
ther imagine adequately nor hope to have himself. The experience of reading

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498 J. P. Riquelme

his own image in antithetical ways contributes to the emptying out and the
potential transvaluing of all that he thought he knew.
The conjunction of the mirror scene and Conroy's thoughts about death
can be formulated in terms of Lacan's mirror stage and the gaze. 8 At the
conclusion of his essay on the mirror stage, Lacan implies that psychoanalysis
can bring the patient to realize that the self is nothing, that every self-repre-
sentation is empty because it is always only a representation: that is, a construct
rather than something full and present. That realization, which reverses the
mirror stage by replacing an apparent fullness with a lack, would seem to
involve a return to the prior stage of development, the body in pieces, not yet
sufficiently aware of representations of itself to constitute an "I," or unified
self. In fact, it is the beginning of a new stage, since the return need not and
perhaps cannot be entirely regressive. Instead, it is an adult version of the
body in pieces, like Gabriel's premonition of eventual death. In Gabriel's case,
it involves the recognition that the body in pieces as the body in death is one
truth that strenuously resists being eradicated by deluded self-representations
and by self-perpetuating social hierarchies. The loss of delusions about one's
own immortality is perhaps inevitably dispiriting, but it can also be liberating.
Once freed from the constraints of the previous construction, the no-longer-
deluded subject has the chance and the obligation to construct something
different. Choices become both possible and necessary when past and present
are reevaluated in the perspective of the future: that is, in the context of
eventual death.
Our own position as readers engaged with the vacillations of free indirect
style at the story's end can overlap with Gabriel's suspended position caused
by his experience of falling within the socially defined hierarchies of self-rep-
resentation. We have the opportunity to recognize that ordinary, conventional
perspectives-such as apparently reliable, determinate third-person reports of
thought or the geometrically defined perspective of realistic painting-can be
made visible for what they are, constructions that create only the impression,
not the reality, of a well-ordered, intelligible, controllable world. And with that
recognition our own stance as the spectator who possesses knowledge and
control is destabilized. That stance corresponds to Gabriel's pose of knowing
and controlling. Rather than indicating a loss of autonomy, the destabilizing
realizes the risks attending the discovery that autonomy is neither absolute
nor limited to ourselves. At issue in the closing style of "The Dead" is some-
thing like the curiously double or multiple form of the anamorph, a figure that,
as the word's etymology suggests, is always forming anew. Joyce's free indirect
style is anamorphic in its frequently dialogical character, its simultaneous evoc-
ation of two possible sources, the teller and the character. It resembles the
anamorph in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (Fig. 1), which Lacan uses to
sketch his concept of the gaze.

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"The Dead" 499

Fig. 1 Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), reproduced by permission of The National
Gallery, London.

The painting includes full-length portraits in conventional perspective of

two diplomats with accoutrements apparently relevant to their station in life.
But it contains in severely altered perspective beneath their feet a represen-
tation of a skull. Once the viewer recognizes the death's head within the de-
piction of the conventionally presented pair ofliving diplomats, an interference
is set up between two geometrical and interpretative perspectives, neither of
which can be ignored. The portrayal of life and achievement has become un-
expectedly and indissolubly linked to an image of death. The would-be "nor-
mal" perspective of the frontal plane is recognized for its constructed character,
as the spectator oscillates between the conventional representation and the

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500 J. P. Riquelme

skull that is always beneath and always distractingly visible. With a crucial,
revealing twist, we see ourselves as dual in the painting understood as a con-
ceptual mirror that reflects the spectator's connection to the ambassadors. The
situation resembles that of Dorian Gray, who sees himself always as double
and antithetical once he comes into possession of his portrait and it comes
into possession of him. As with The Ambassadors, the picture of Dorian Gray
gazes back at the spectator who recognizes a true but unpleasant self-image in
the portrait.
In the frontal plane of Holbein's painting, we recognize something of
ourselves in the conventional social beings who are the ambassadors, defined
by the trappings that culture provides in order for its members to know and
present themselves as conventional. In the angled plane beneath the ambas-
sadors' feet, we see an image that is both ours and the ambassadors'. The
monarch that we and these ambassadors serve is death itself. The anamorph
undoes more than conventions of realistic geometrical perspective; it undoes
temporarily the effect of the mirror stage by giving us the experience of being
looked at and controlled rather than being the viewer who occupies the position
of control. That experience is one version of what Lacan calls the gaze. Instead
of controlling the vanishing point, we experience vanishing and dissolution in
the conceptual space projected by the representation's seeming incoherence.
The radical, if only temporary, change in our subject position can have a
permanent, transvaluing effect. The radical shift and potential effect are cap-
tured in Gabriel's recognition of his connection to the dead, his recognition,
and ours, that death rather than palaver is the word known to all men and all
women. The snow has begun to look back at Gabriel.
Like the rest of us no matter what our place in the social hierarchy,
Gabriel finally cannot choose to avoid death, though he can choose within
limits how he will live until death takes him. For Pecora, however, Gabriel
cannot choose even that because everything has already been chosen for him,
including his language and his thoughts, especially the word "generous" and
the ideological, deluded, self-destructive social tendencies that Pecora claims
the word signifies throughout "The Dead" (Pecora 243-55). He cites as par-
ticularly damning the first sentence of the penultimate paragraph: "Generous
tears filled Gabriel's eyes" (D 223). Pecora identifies the statement as the cul-
mination of a series of apparently generous actions and statements about gen-
erosity in the story, including Gabriel's gift to Lily, his remarks in his speech
about hospitality (D 202-03), and the loan to Freddy Malins that Gretta praises
(D 217). With good evidence Pecora argues that Gabriel regularly recovers
from humiliation through gestures of generosity that are actually self-serving
rather than self-sacrificing. In this reading the final mention of the word is
merely a habitual, defensive repetition induced by a distorted cultural ethos.
There is a significant pattern of connections pertaining to generosity in
"The Dead," a pattern that involves a range of meanings and implications

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"The Dead" 501

that readers can reasonably attach to the word "generous" as it occurs at the
story's end. In this regard, Pecora's reading of the "generous tears" is too
univocal. Applying a Nietzschean, genealogical method, he correctly points
out that Joyce probably would have known the etymology of the word, that
"the Latin generosus means, before anything else, 'of noble birth, well-bred' "
(Pecora 243-44). Consequently, every predication of generosity is for Pecora
also an assertion of class superiority. Although this etymology is correct, it is
also only partial. It conveniently overlooks something that Joyce also probably
knew, something that he could have discovered from reading Skeat: the con-
nection of the English word generous to the Latin genus (stem gener-) and to
the Indo-European root gen:J or gen-. Ifwe go back to this other link and other
origin rather than stopping with generosus, the English word carries relevant
implications that do not involve social hierarchies.
Besides "L. generosus, (properly) of noble birth," Skeat's entry for "gen-
erous" includes "L. gener-" and sends us to the previous entry, "generic," to
find the identification of gener- as "decl. stem of genus" (Skeat 210). In his
appendix 3, "Select List of Latin Words," Skeat glosses "gen-us" as "kin" and
lists among the English derivatives not only "genteel," "gentry," and "genu-
ine," which support Pecora's reading, but also "general" (Skeat 636). That
word is, of course, crucial to the story's ending, for it occurs when Gabriel
repeats the statement that "snow was general all over Ireland" (D 223). "Gen-
erous tears" points forward to "general" as much as it does backward to Ga-
briel's acts of beneficence. In the appendix, Skeat also sends us to his entry
for "kin," which he defines as "genus, race" and allies with the Latin genus
through the root "GEN." In tracing the origin and affiliations of "kin," Skeat
lists words that mean "tribe" as well as "kin" (Skeat 278). In the entry for
"generous," The American Heritage Dictionary provides a similar etymology
back to "genus (stem gener-), birth, race, kind" (549) and to the Indo-European
root gen~. The dictionary's appendix, "Indo-European Roots," shows that
root giving rise both to the word "kin" and the word "king." It is also the
origin of the word "kind" in two senses ( 1516), only one of which supports
Pecora's reading. Kind can mean "generous or hospitable," but it also refers
to kindred, "a class or category of similar or related individuals" (721). On
etymological grounds there is as much evidence for a reversal in the pattern
of Gabriel's self-congratulatory and self-protective generosity in the story's end
as for its continuance. We can read Gabriel's "generous tears" as linked more
with the snow, "general all over Ireland," than with his earlier self-interested
magnanimity. In this alternative reading, Gabriel is not merely exercising his
habit of dominating solicitude again; he has discovered through a heightened
sense of mortality his kinship to a group. His kindred now include the whole
tribe or race, and Gretta's story and his thoughts together begin to articulate
the "uncreated conscience" of his "race" (Portrait 253) that Stephen Dedalus
hopes to forge.

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502 J.P. Riquelme

There are, in addition, some difficulties of identifying in a uni vocal way

voice and referent in "generous tears" that Pecora does not attend to. Despite
the fact that free indirect style regularly raises problems of attribution, prob-
lems that Pecora seems to recognize, he assigns the final paragraphs to Gabriel
without discussion. 9 This reading assumes that the reader takes the word to
be Gabriel's: that is, that Gabriel thinks of himself as feeling and acting in a
generous way. But the word could instead be the narrator's judgment about
Gabriel's feelings rather than a description or rendering of them. Further com-
plicating the reading of "generous" is its dual status as an adjective that can
be understood equally well in physical as in psychological terms. The dual
reference, to the state of Gabriel's feelings and to the size of his tears, makes
determinate attribution difficult. 10 If the physical meaning is accepted (it would
be hard to exclude), then the word cannot easily be assigned to Gabriel only,
unless we maintain that in the midst of crying he is aware of the size of his
own tears. Given its ambiguous origin in teller or character or both and its
dual reference to feelings and size, the word "generous" functions something
like the famous drawing resembling both a duck and a rabbit that Wittgenstein
and Gombrich discuss (Wittgenstein 194; sec. 2.11; Gombrich 4-6; see the
version of this drawing in my Teller and Tale [41]). As with other optical
illusions, once the perceiver recognizes an alternative to the configuration in-
itially noticed, it is not possible to block out either image entirely and return
to a simpler, singular view. Pecora's critical procedure implicitly denies that
Joyce's language carries multiple possibilities, even apparently irreconcilable
ones, some of which counter the singular meaning that he relies on in his
argument. Such a denial oflanguage's sometimes double and antithetical nature
removes its antihierarchical potential; it is a denial of language's human, spe-
cifically its mortal, character.
As with the gaze in Lacan, the ideological, socially determined aspect of
realistic, conventional representation emerges into view when such a double
image disturbs the stability of what seemed singular, univocal, and unified.
The fluid character of free indirect discourse calls up the self that in speaking
tries to take a determinate, comforting shape, but it also undermines the pos-
sibility of locating a determinate origin for the speech. Without a sense of
origin or stable perspective, the shape becomes protean. It can also become
collective, the shape and speech of a group. No longer primarily the passive
recipient of shapes that society imposes, this protean subject cannot be con-
tained, though, like the surface of a sphere, it has its limits. As a form of
dissolution it recognizes within itself the disintegration that death completes.
This side of death, the recognition can dissolve and reform the culturally
generated shapes and boundaries of hierarchical difference. The loss of a de-
luded sense of power over death can displace the false sense of power and
authority in other arenas, including especially social relations. Gabriel repeats
in a new context the language of the newspaper already repeated to him by a

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"The Dead" 503

woman about the snow being general over Ireland. By doing so he begins
actualizing a group speech whose content implies the equality of all members
of the group. Earlier Miss Ivors berated Gabriel for his contributions to a pro-
British newspaper. His relation to a newspaper's language is quite different
when he repeats the statement about the snow, a statement that focuses on
the weather, something that eludes the power ofany political faction to control.
His choral speaking involves a blurring of the boundaries of the individual
speaking self that has one stylistic counterpart in free indirect discourse. Ex-
ploitative palaver and the lancing dance of gender conflict are replaced in the
story's ending by speech and actions that carry the meaning ofa danse macabre
in which all the partners are equal.
The discovery that ultimate dissolution is inevitable and always recog-
nizable creates a vacuum where previously there seemed to be a plenitude. A
hierarchical culture that denies the reality of death abhors such a vacuum. It
does so because the emptiness vigorously and implacably resists being filled
by delusions of grandeur, being shackled by the actions of social arbiters, and
being controlled by the machinery of culture's representations of itself to itself
as intelligible, rational, natural, and benign. The obvious fact that the survival
of the individual is limited has potentially significant implications of various
sorts for social structure. The attempt to ignore that fact is regularly reflected
in hierarchies of rank and domination, such as those within which Gabriel
Conroy has functioned. The lack that resists being rationalized by such hier-
archies makes possible new arrangements for the subject that need not be
motivated by prejudgments that are prejudicial. At the end of "The Dead"
those new arrangements are still beyond the horizon of the story's represen-
tational limits. They remain to be actualized by the reader as well as by the
character when the dissolution of the character's self is communicated and
transferred through free indirect style. Rather than putting us under arrest,
"The Dead" provides the opportunity for a recognition of human limits that
can help make freedom, with all its risks and uncertainties, possible.

Notes
1 The best-known of these is D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police, which deals

with nineteenth-century British fiction.

2 Chapter 6, "Social Paralysis and the Generosity of the Word: Joyce's 'The

Dead'" (Pecora 214-59). I provide a more general commentary on Self and Form than
the one contained in this essay in my review of the book (forthcoming in Novel).
3 Pecora's attack on the dissolution of the self in Joyce is largely motivated by

the connection he wants to see between it and deconstruction.

4 The history of the words galoshes and guttapercha (D 181) helps clarify the

cultural history that is one context for Gabriel's demand that his wife protect her feet

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504 J. P. Riquelme

from the wet. The word guttapercha is derived from the Malay phrase that refers to
the substance "gum" derived from the "percha" tree. As the citations in the OED (6:
971) make clear, by the third quarter of the nineteenth century guttapercha, like Indian
rubber, had become a significant import into European markets from colonial sources.
It made telegraphy possible through its use as an insulating material. The American
Heritage Dictionary suggests that galosh derives ultimately from Latin words referring
to Gaul, the part of the continent that includes modern France and Belgium. By rec-
ommending galoshes made of guttapercha, Gabriel is supporting a continental fashion
that relies on colonial raw materials.
5 This characterization of free indirect discourse is Ann Banfield's in Unspeakable

Sentences.
6 In his recent article, Garry Leonard discusses Gabriel's difficulties with women

as threats to masculine subjectivity. Leonard's commentary, which uses Lacanian con-

cepts but not primarily the gaze, is by and large consonant with my own.
7 In suggesting that free indirect style can involve a reversal of manipulative forms

of looking-on, I am following up an implication of Beth Newman's comment about

Virginia Woolfs dispersal of the "narratorial look" (1038) in the closing paragraphs
of her" 'The Situation of the Looker-On.' "The suggestion is at odds with D. A. Miller's
contention that style indirect libre involves the subverting of the character's authority
and the confirming of the narration's "master-voice" (Miller 25). My disagreement with
Miller, which I pursue only implicitly in the present essay, extends to his general view
of reading as an act of surveillance in which the reader is deluded into feeling free from
being surveilled (Miller 162). Contrary to Miller's reductive characterization of reading,
I find that fictional texts can and regularly do provide the reader with an experience
that is the equivalent of being looked at, an experience analogous to the one that Gabriel
undergoes. They are full of surprises, often surprises that involve cultural history, in-
cluding the changing meanings of words. Rather than lulling us into a deluded sense
of mastery, these surprises can trigger a recognition of our own mortality, our ultimate
lack of power over certain things and events.
8 Lacan's best-known discussion of the mirror stage is "The mirror stage as form-

ative of the function of the I" in Ecrits. He discusses the gaze in chapters 6 through 9,
"Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.
9 Victor Luftig and Mark Wollaeger discuss this problem in Pecora's argument

in their lengthy review of Self and Form (681).

10 I discuss this particular problem of attribution briefly in my essay on Joyce's

early fiction in The Cambridge Companion to Joyce ( 127) and at greater length in Teller
and Tale (127). As I mention in Teller and Tale, Joyce plays on the double character
of"generous" in the tenth episode, "Wandering Rocks," of Ulysses when he describes
as "generous" ( U 10.251) Molly's fleshy arm in the act of throwing a coin to the one-
legged sailor.

Works Cited

American Heritage Dictionary. 1969 ed.

Banfield, Ann. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language
of Fiction. Boston: Routledge, 1982.

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"The Dead" 505

Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology ofPictorial Representation.

New York: Pantheon, 1960.
Joyce, James. "The Dead." Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes
and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking, 1969. 175-224.
____ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed.
Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.
____ Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York: Garland, 1984, 1986.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
Trans. of Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
- - - · The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis. 1978. Trans. Alan Sher-
idan. New York: Norton, 1981. Trans. of Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan XI: Les
quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
Leonard, Garry. "Joyce and Lacan: 'The Woman' as a Symptom of Masculinity in 'The
Dead.'" James Joyce Quarterly 28 (1991): 451-72.
Luftig, Victor, and Mark Wollaeger. Rev. of Self and Form in Modern Narrative, by
Vincent P. Pecora. James Joyce Quarterly 27 (1990): 673-82.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Marx-Engels Reader.
2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 594-617.
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of Califronia P, 1988.
Newman, Beth. " 'The Situation of the Looker On': Gender, Narration, and Gaze in
Wuthering Heights.'' PMLA 105 (1990): 1029-41.
Oxford English Dictionary. 1989 ed.
Pecora, Vincent P. Self and Form in Modern Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1989.
Riquelme, J. P. Rev. of Self and Form in Modern Narrative, by Vincent P. Pecora.
Novel (forthcoming).
- - - · "Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man: Styles
of Realism and Fantasy.'' The Cambridge Companion to Joyce. Ed. Derek At-
tridge. Cambridge UP, 1990. 103-30.
____ Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1983.
Skeat, Walter W. A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 1882.
New York: Capricorn, 1969.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed.
New York: MacMillan, 1968.

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